For many medical patients, it is an important part of their therapy and recovery that they exercise. In particular, it can be important in many situations to extend and retract one's arm in order to regain use of the arm. For example, it commonly occurs that victims of cerebrovascular accidents experience flexor synergy. Moderate exercise can go a long way to help such a patient recover.
Unfortunately, typical known exercise equipment is primarily designed for use by persons who are already reasonably fit. Indeed, most exercise equipment is designed to allow a person who is reasonably fit to increase the person's strength or conditioning. In this regard, typical known exercise equipment usually have a moderately high resistance to movement (in order to build muscle tone or muscle mass). Unfortunately, for many medical patients, such moderately high resistence to movement presents an absolute barrier to the use of the equipment because at the moment the patient lacks the strength to move the equipment.
Accordingly, it can be seen that a need yet remains for an therapeutic exercise apparatus which can be used by medical patients and which presents very little resistence to movement. It is to the provision of such a therapeutic exercise apparatus that the present invention is primarily directed.